The Cyber Show on the Slop Bubble
"We're paused on new interview episodes for the podcast while we sort out some AV and studio issues," The Cyber Show wrote yesterday, but it has a new article about the implosion of the slop bubble:
This week I am overwhelmed by the force of comments about how "AI" and Big Tech is dying. It's as if the floodgates of acceptance have opened up after a long period of denial about something, an idea, that we thought we loved, grew to hate, and struggle to move on from.In tech, the role of "confidence" is indeed much like that in economics - to prevent a run on the banks. A 'run' on Big Tech is no less imaginable - a sudden, widespread rejection of the values, ideas and brands that have dominated for decades.
Multiple complex factors are aligning to dent confidence in the "AI" and Big Tech bubble, which will soon burst. Even the strongest proponents and investors want that to happen, to clear the air like a thunderstorm at the end of a long, tiring Indian summer. They're massively over-committed. It's been a multi-trillion dollar decades-long wrong turn, a wilful misunderstanding of what people want and need. They hope that after the slaughter of most of the industry, the few survivors will move from a cash-burning investment phase to a slump where the technology is integrated and slowly profitable. That can only happen if some "belief" persists.
The dotcom bubble and other stages of Internet and e-commerce were survivable because broadly people still had faith and reason to adopt technologies that benefitted them after the watershed. "AI" threatens not just economic disruption (of Schumpeter's sort), but fatal disruption of the cultural, geopolitical and environmental substructure of modernity.
"AI" may die, even if spectacularly successful, because humanity cannot absorb the damage of that success.